Apple launched the new iPad(poor name, good idea) recently. While it’s not the first device with similar characteristics – think Kindle – it does have more capabilities and, with Apple behind it, probably more market share in the future. But, as a photographer, I think we are seeing a new direction for photography. (The title of this post comes from the fact that I’m sure there are a lot of people who saw this a long time ago.)

The old way of selling people photos is going to disappear sooner rather than later. I refer to the print market. Sure, well-known photographers will still sell prints for people to hang on their walls. But the millions of us who are, shall I say, less well-known, might still be able to develop a market of sorts. Web sites like Flickr already are making millions of photos available to the masses. And many people have smart phones and/or digital pictures frames. For purposes of this post, I think of the iPad as a giant smart phone even though it’s far more than that.

So, people trying to sell their pictures of, say, a local sports team, might want to target just digital photos. Forget trying to set up a website to sell prints, nobody has either the wall space or the desk space to exhibit print photos. The smart phones and the digital picture frames provide us with unlimited wall space. More on this later…

I spent the day at Uvas Canyon. It’s a great little park in the vicinity of Morgan Hill – the county is Santa Clara County. The recent work gallery has been updated to show some of the scenes from the Canyon. On my way up, I ran into an couple of hikers on their way down the path. They mentioned there were “hundreds” of hibernating lady bugs along the path. So, I made a picture on some of them. Hundreds doesn’t begin to describe it. This is definitely a recommended hike. Get out there and do it.

Finally got out for a while today but there were significant differences in subjects from beginning to end. Started out looking for color in Golden Gate Park. Not much luck but did find a few things. On the way home, stopped by Fort Point to check out the surfing. There were fairly big waves and quite a few surfers so I banged away for a while. The shot here is my favorite of the day but check out the others.

I’ve updated the main page and the recent gallery to a new look. The major change is that Flash is no longer used. The Recent Gallery now uses JavaScript – jQuery and a plug-in called GalleryView 2.0. There’s not much documentation on how to set it up but I found a website that had a working example.

I’m not all that happy with the recent gallery at this point so there may be more changes in the coming weeks.

Lagunitas Creek in Marin County is a “must see” destination for salmon. They have arrived. Here’s a really lousy picture of one I took today. It’s dark in there and I don’t have a 600mm f/2.8 lens so it was a difficult shot. This one was hand held at 1/10 sec. You can see a better shot, and read about tours on the SFgate website.

BTW, the docent was incredibly informative and helpful. I recommend a trip to see the salmon. It’s a great experience. Here’s the location, I think. (Didn’t have my GPS receiver on.)

Later — Today’s Chronicle has a front page story about the salmon. I might disagree with the statment, in the article, that says ” Dozens of coho salmon have been spotted.” According to the docent yesterday, they are aware of six salmon in that area of the creek. But the Chron may be referring to all of Marin. Who knows?

The most recent issue of Sierra, the Sierra Club magazine, has an article with some awesome photos of waves. Check it out on the Sierra Club website. Makes me feel beat up just looking at them.

For some time, I’ve been using CHDK with my Canon SD1000 to shoot RAW. I like the advantages of RAW so this made sense for me. The IQ of the SD1000 doesn’t get any better, it’s just easier to deal with processing. One disadvantage is that the format- CRW – isn’t supported by Adobe. So, you need a program to convert.

I had been using dng4ps, a free program but somewhat unreliable – not to mention slow. I recently came across Raw Photo Processor. After some testing, I find it to be much better than dng4ps. The only real drawback is that it produces tiff files instead of dngs. But it is much faster and free also. Check it out.

My “recent work” gallery has been updated.  Took a trip to Marin, yet again, and went to Dawn Falls.  I thought there would be more water since we’ve had several days of rain but it wasn’t spectacular – just nice.  Finished up at the Marin Garden Center in Ross.  Nice Color there.

It’s that time of year again and my 2010 Calendar is now available. The theme this time is the Sierra Nevada featuring Yosemite, Mono Lake and Lake Tahoe. You can preview and order the calendar here.
Because of the continuing hard times, I’ve dropped the price again this year to a rock-bottom $14.99.

Ever so often, I run across an idea that really works for me. One such idea is this article by Ray Maxwell on how to set your camera for more accurate histograms. Explained some things I had wondered about.